Bud Holman — Vero Beach, Florida

Bud L. Holman was a Vero Beach car dealer and airport man whose name is on the ballpark at Dodgertown. The official Walter O'Malley history of Dodgertown records that he was born in Versailles, Kentucky, on September 18, 1900, and that he opened his successful Vero Beach Cadillac Company in 1925, two decades before the Dodgers deal that made him a fixture of Vero Beach history.

His public career followed two lines that met in 1947. First he helped create the Vero Beach airport and pulled Eastern Air Lines into it. Then, after the Navy handed the wartime base back to the city, he went looking for someone to use its empty barracks and landed the Brooklyn Dodgers. The Baseball and Dodgertown state marker sums up that second act in one line: Dodgertown became the Dodgers' spring training home in 1948 when local business leader Bud Holman convinced the Dodgers to set up a spring training facility in Vero Beach.

Holman was an early backer of flying in Vero Beach. The O'Malley history says Holman was one of a handful of residents who had originally established the airport in 1929, and the Indian River Guardian wrote in 2013 that Holman played a large part in creating the airport back in 1929. Three years later he secured the field's first airline. In 1932, according to the O'Malley history, Holman had convinced Eastern Air Lines to make the Vero airport a fueling stop on its Florida route.

Mail followed. The same history says Holman and Postmaster J.J. Schumann were instrumental in obtaining direct air mail service for the community in 1935, making Vero Beach the smallest U.S. city to have the service at the time. A companion essay on the O'Malley site, Haven of Tolerance, describes him as a local auto dealer who had helped build the Vero Beach airport, and says that under his auspices the town of 3,600 had become Eastern Airlines' smallest regularly scheduled point of service. That Eastern connection stayed with him: when his stadium was dedicated in 1953, an Eastern vice president helped unveil the plaque.

The Dodger deal began with a surplus base. After World War II the Navy returned the airport and its training complex to the city, and by 1947 Holman, then the Vero Beach Municipal Airport Manager, was trying to find a tenant for about 100 acres of abandoned two-story wooden barracks beside the runways, the O'Malley history says. He asked which baseball team had the largest minor league system, was told the Dodgers, and contacted Dodger president Branch Rickey about setting up a training headquarters in Vero Beach.

The MLB timeline for the 1940s adds how Holman heard about the opening. Rickey's daughter mentioned to a neighbor that the club was searching for a training site in the United States, and the neighbor relayed it to Bud Holman. Rickey then sent Buzzie Bavasi, general manager of the Dodgers' farm club at Nashua, New Hampshire, south by train on November 2, 1947, to look at the Vero Beach facilities before going on to sites in Fort Pierce and Stuart. He never went on. The timeline quotes Bavasi: Bud Holman met me at the train and he wouldn't let me go any farther south. The Indian River Guardian put it more briefly in 2013, writing that the clever Holman never let Bavasi out of Vero.

Holman stayed at the table through the negotiations. The MLB timeline records that Dodger officials, Bud Holman and Vero Beach councilmember J. R. Reaves were involved, and that on December 19, 1947, Rickey told his board that a five year lease at $1.00 per year was expected. The Vero Beach Press-Journal reported the choice of Vero Beach on December 11, 1947. According to the Indian River Guardian, the proposal to Rickey even included a name for the facility, Dodgertown, and the camp opened for training in early 1948.

Holman also put his own credit behind the camp. When Rickey wanted a swimming pool for the players at Dodgertown and asked Holman and the city to start a fund for it, the O'Malley history says Holman guaranteed the construction himself, to be reimbursed using funds from future Dodger exhibition games, and the pool was built. The same source notes that, though he became a rabid Dodger fan, Holman initially knew little about baseball; he saw a business opportunity for Vero Beach and acted on it.

The Dodgers repaid him with a ballpark. According to the MLB timeline for the 1950s, on January 15, 1953, Walter O'Malley announced in the Press Journal that the new stadium at Dodgertown would be named for Bud L. Holman, the man responsible for attracting the Dodgers to the former U.S. Naval Air Station at Vero Beach. Holman Stadium was dedicated on March 11, 1953, before an overflow crowd of 5,532, and its plaque reads that the Brooklyn Dodgers dedicate Holman Stadium to honor Bud L. Holman of the Friendly City of Vero Beach.

Eastern Air Lines had a part in the ceremony. The timeline says M.M. Jack Frost, vice president of Eastern, stood in for Eastern president Eddie Rickenbacker and unveiled the plaque with O'Malley, and that Holman briefly responded to the honor. The same MLB account notes that when Holman Stadium opened, the ballpark had more seats, 5,000, than Vero Beach had people. The Indian River Guardian's 2013 history says the stadium was named to honor Holman for his contributions to the team and to the city of Vero Beach.

Holman's name is still in daily use at the Vero Beach complex. MLB's Holman Stadium page introduces him as local businessman and Airport Director Bud Holman, who in 1947 approached the Brooklyn Dodgers about making the vacated naval air station their spring training home, and it lists a later renovation that replaced the seating bowl with 6,478 new seats. The state marker placed in 2014 records that Walter O'Malley privately built the 6,500-seat Holman Stadium in 1953, and that the Dodgers trained at Dodgertown until 2008.

A smaller trace survives in the photo record. The Haven of Tolerance essay includes a picture of Bud Holman, prominent Vero Beach business leader for whom Holman Stadium was later named, putting the final touches on a Branch Rickey Boulevard street sign at Dodgertown, part of the camp's custom of naming its streets for Hall of Fame figures.